Select Local Merchants

Winner of the 2010 ENERGY STAR Award for Sustained Excellence, Lowe's has been helping customers conserve energy and expletives with home improvement, gardening, and hardware solutions for every budget. With the store's friendly handypeople as their guide, nail-pounding novices and seasoned remodelers alike can outfit their toolbox for any undertaking with more than 6,000 products between $25 and $50. Impress spouses and annoy car-pooling coworkers by ably installing ceiling fans into your car roof. Add lighting fixtures to darkling domiciles, or finally finish your back yard's Super Mario Bros. level with Lowe's garden tools. The store can also mix together a rainbow of hues for painting projects involving dining rooms, nurseries, and sweat lodges. Afterwards, you can clean up the dust with a 6-Gallon HP Wet/dry Shop Vac ($44.97), or rinse off caulk-covered corpuses under the
Moen Brushed Nickel 7 Spray Pattern Shower Massager ($49.98). Regardless of your mission, the accommodating staff at Lowe's will offer expert advice for completing your home's improvements.

With summer in full force, now is the ideal time to throw open the windows and get home-care projects underway. Pick up a Stanley six-piece screwdriver set for $6.99, a VPT rip hammer for $8.99, and a whole bunch of screws, anchors, and bolts (prices vary), and you'll be ready to finally mount every buffalo nickel and steel penny in your coin collection. Illuminate the newfound décor with a 12-pack of Ace light bulbs ($19.99), the better to see by as you make use of a Purdy four-piece premium paint-tray kit ($19.99). If you need to match paint to a favorite coverlet or choose a hue that complements a pleather recliner, each store offers a paint-matching service free of charge. Get keys made for $1.49 a pop, or clean a barnacle-encrusted carpet with the help of a carpet-cleaning machine ($24.99 a day to rent).

TechShop RDU
Recently featured on WBTV for sending a weather balloon built out of spare parts into outer space, TechShop RDU has a supportive community of inventors, artists, technicians, and alchemists who are all excited about their next big idea, creating an environment limited only by the imagination. The 20,000-square-foot smorgasbord of inventive creativity beckons people of all skill levels to its DIY confines, where members can wield tools not found in most private workshops, slicing through steel with a plasma cutter or accessing 3-D design software to finally realize the goal of crawling inside the Internet. Hands-on classes jump-start creative juices, introducing students to vocational skills including welding, soldering, and woodworking. Neophyte inventors aged 12–17 are welcome but must be accompanied by a parent or guardian to ensure they don't break physics.

A personalized fitness assessment determines which areas of the gymnastic sciences you need the most help in, allowing you to focus on problem subjects during your month of no-holds-barred gym access. O2's facilities play host to a variety of playground equipment for the adult-child at heart. Burn your calories in style on more than 100 pieces of individual cardio equipment. Each apparatus is decked out with a personal entertainment screen that doubles as a futuristic magazine tray or vertical forehead-rest. In addition, a full selection of free weights and strength machines allows you to tone and sculpt with Michelangelic precision.

Ultimate Storage Company makes it easy to find extra space, offering clean storage units and handy storage supplies, from gift boxes to mailing envelopes to corrugated mailers. Ultimate Storage Company is fully gated with keypad access and offers 24-hour video surveillance, keeping all keepsakes safe from harm. Storage units range from the closet size of 5' x 5' on up to the garage size of 10' x 20' to suit individual needs ($65–$168 per month, depending on the size). Safely hide particularly special holiday gifts within Ultimate Storage's secure facilities, or store priceless antiques somewhere other than a chilly attic. Three convenient locations are available with daily access between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m.

Supplying contractors and do-it-yourselfers for almost nine decades, the family-owned Little Hardware Company stocks a complete selection of high-quality tools, hardware, and hard-to-find items. Customers can protect fingers from jobsite hazards, home-remodeling incidents, and roving gangs of manicurists with a wealth of insulated and regular gloves ($0.99–$36.99). Carve manifestoes into tree trunks with an assortment of pocket knives ($6.99+) such as the Kershaw Oso Sweet model ($23.89), or complete toolboxes with Little Hardware's full line of Irwin vise grips ($5.99–$44.79). Timberland boots enclose feet in stylish comfort ($85.49–$99.99), and power tools from DeWalt, Bosch, Makita, Milwaukee, and Festool supply wielders with more might than the enchanted screwdriver King Arthur used to install Camelot's spice racks.